About the Show

April 13 – May 13, 2022

Every Time I Think I Have Something, I Sneeze explores the relationship between change and documentation, asking questions about their coexistence. Interdisciplinary artist Jesse McLaughlin navigates physical, emotional, and ontological changes during his medical and social transition. The work in this exhibition eludes the camera’s desire to capture through the distortion of the visible and familiar. Impressions, blurs, distortions, disembodied sounds, and voices become forms of record-keeping.

McLaughlin questions the relationship between liberation and capture: must one always precede the other? Documentation of change, especially in the intimate process of transitioning and growing up, is today a highly public realm. The warped chronology of the show emphasizes the stasis of flux in the continual processes of change. Through the manipulation of seeing, listening, and thinking with the familiar and foreign simultaneously, McLaughlin’s work eludes a clear distinction of a clear singular self.

– Jasmine Buckley (BA’22) Curator

Every Time I Think I Have Something I Sneeze documents profound physical, emotional, and ontological changes that occurred throughout the warped chronology of my medical and social transition. As the frantic camera hunts for clear capture, contradiction, distortion, and the familiar within the foreign provide shelter through a process of dislocation and disembodiment. I continue to struggle with what it means to document evidence of change and often notice my white-knuckled grip on the camera; so desperate am I to grab hold of a singular, discrete self amongst incongruities. Must liberation always be preceded by capture? Then again, every question is the new question, asked over and over.

– Jesse McLaughlin

Every two years a trans person

who came out two years ago

declares herself an old school

transsexual. Every trans elder is

like so old now, in their thirties or

even late twenties. Every rich

trans person who just came out

is a new hope for trans people, the

one to really get this right. Every

trans person who got a media job

invented gender fluidity a year ago.

Every trans person who tracked

tenure before transing out is the leading

intellectual. Every trans person speaks

for every trans person, which is to say

there is only one trans person. Every

decade is a new trans moment, the

first ever trans literature, the first talk

show interview, the first trans billionaire,

the first transsexual polemic, the first arrival

of trans arrival. Every older transsexual

is problematic. Every trans discourse is

the new discourse. Every trans joke

is the new joke, told over and over.

-Amy Marvin

(by permission of Amy Marvin)